Kasisto Secures $2.25M in Seed Funding

The round was led by New York Angels with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, the Partnership Fund for New York City, the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Angels of New York, and financial service executives and entrepreneurs including Cristobal Conde (former CEO of SunGard), and Larry Ng (founder of MoneyLine Telerate and TradeWeb). They joined existing shareholders SRI International and BBVA, a global financial services group.

Led by Zor Gorelov, CEO and co-founder, Kasisto Kasisto leverages SRI’s artificial intelligence technology to deliver mobile virtual personal assistants, virtual specialists, that help consumers perform tasks requiring deep knowledge of a service and the consumer’s relationship with that service.
The company is initially focusing on the financial services vertical and currently working with a number of banks to pilot virtual specialists for their mobile banking applications. For example, in a banking application, a consumer can ask the virtual specialist to pay a credit card bill from her checking account. The virtual specialist would detect if the funds in checking were insufficient and offer to move money from savings to checking to avoid any overdraft fees.

Kasisto has been selected as an inaugural participant in the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator Fund, a program for technology companies building innovative customer experiences in financial services.
In conjunction with the funding, Jeffrey Seltzer, a board member of New York Angels, joined the company’s board.